Social Media

This Entitlement of Free Needs to Go Away

One of the most basic tenets of Web 2.0 has been this idea that everything can and should be free for everyone on the Web to use because whatever inherent costs incurred by a service can be paid for by advertising; or in some cases it would seem - by VC dollars.

This concept has led to nothing short of a feeling of entitlement by a vast majority of Web users so that when a company that launches a free model service decides that it needs to institute a premium version of the service, people react like they have been betrayed. This sense of betrayal can range from total outrage as when LiveJournal users found themselves with Russian owners right through to simple resignation.

I would likely agree with Multiply.com too that most of those hi-res photos aren’t viewed… ergo aren’t generally useful to the user, or the public. I guess not everything in life is or will remain free.

While Jim may not have intended it with his post but his response in the last line of the quote typifies the current attitude that everything on the Web has to be free. It doesn't matter if there are costs associated with providing these services, which Multiply.com points out in their announcement post on the matter

Multiply users post millions of photos and tens of thousands of videos a day, and that’s a lot of stuff to store and manage, which costs money and resources. We’ve also learned that an overwhelming majority of the original photos and videos are never even viewed! Clearly, for many Multiply users, the album-sized photos and Flash videos are good enough.

It doesn't matter that bandwidth costs money. It doesn't matter that increasing need for more and more storage costs money. It doesn't matter that remote database access costs money. After all it is these things that the ad dollars are suppose to be paying for while making the companies rich so why should we have to pay for it too - right?.

We all seem to have this belief that for the price of looking and clicking on ads that this entitles us to have our data stored by these services forever without paying a cent. While we might think that this is feasible on the Web, we would never think of going to our local storage company and expect them to give us a free storage unit to keep our junk in forever. Whether the storage is by the square foot or by the megabytes the fact is that storage costs money.

The fact is that besides the hard dollar costs of the actual hardware there is also the inherent cost of the hardware upgrade path. The hard drives might be getting bigger and cheaper but they all have to be replaced and added to at some point. On top of that there are the soft dollar costs of people managing those continual upgrades. Sure more and more developers might be using services themselves like Amazon's S3 and E3 services but even those costs will not stay the same. All companies need to make profits so you can be sure that the costs to those living off of these bigger services is going to go up. At some point ad dollars are not going to be enough to justify a business.

Currently we have been lulled into believing that all these services can keep giving us this stuff for free because the advertisers are willing to keep throwing money away in order to keep themselves in front of the eyeballs out there. What happens though when the time comes that advertisers want more than just pageview eyeballs. After all, we all brag about ignoring ads. I can't even count the number of times I have seen people proudly proclaim, "What ads... I use an ad blocker so I never see them," or boast that "I've become blind to them so it doesn't matter if they run ads."

What happens to all these services when the advertisers decide that online advertising may not be doing the job and start demanding better results for their spending dollars. Right now in the infancy of the Web advertisers are willing to believe in the fallacy of the CPM model but that could be changing and if that is the case what happens to our data. We put in a lot of time and effort building up those large banks of data — whether they be family photos or video files of interesting stuff — and the fact is that as more and more of these free services start closing their doors we stand to lose it all.

There will come a point when the users will have had enough of all this and no amount of free stuff is going to get them in the door. We have to remember at some point that anything of value has a price - a price that can't be covered by the shaky platform of ad supported services. We need to remember that not all good things in this world need to be free and that sometimes we need to pay for the services we want on the Web - the same way we do in the real world.

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